reflection

It will never be easy to say goodbye. On my 32nd birthday during the Holy Week, we had decided to finally put one of our dog’s to sleep.

Miriam was a shy but confident dog. But in the last weeks, her health was deteriorating quickly and no amount of medicine could stop it. She had developed renal failure.

I remember crying hard when I last approached her before I left for Makati that last weekend. On the car leaving the house, my nephew said that Miriam still managed to get up and peek through her place.

The first quarter was about to end. I needed to use of all my leaves, but I did not have anywhere to go. For today, I took a day off to go to UP and request copies of my transcript.

It was not a chore before when I was still based in Marikina. But being from Makati on weekdays, I had to do the long traverse along EDSA just to reach Diliman.

While I love how vast UP Diliman is, it annoys me a lot why the cashier is at the far end of the Registrar. It is very counter-intuitive. There is a cashier downstairs, but it is often closed. Anyway, it was less tedious because I was with Ikle. We were done at around lunch time and had the whole afternoon to wait for the rush hour to subside. And that includes shenanigans around the campus.

A new year is always a fresh start! While things do not always turn out as originally planned, it is important to always move forward.

Back in August, I arranged my application to the UP Open University. It took three months to get a feedback from the Admissions Office and I heard of my acceptance to the Graduate Certificate program at the end of November. I had mulled over whether I should continue or not. What are my plans and what I hope to achieve with this new venture?

Six weeks after I received the e-mail, I finally decided to go for it. I am going to be a student again!

It’s exactly 11:36 PM tonight, 11th of September and I am still wide awake. I have no work tomorrow because of Eid al-Adha. With a bad movie playing on the background, I have some white noise to block out the rain outside. I also took this photo with my laptop camera for no apparent reason.

My “Hello 9/11” face

Anyway, it was a very eventful week. I got a great news before Friday ended. I will be flying to Thailand this October for about half a month. My friend, Becca, was unfortunately unable to come to the course and I had to go, instead of the supposed November schedule. I was the fourth person on the list and I was suddenly asked to jump in. Just imagine, about exactly a year ago, I was in Guam for work-related travel and a year after, here I am again. There are certainly things I have to be thankful for, considering I had this soliloquy more than four years ago and another one a year after. But I would like to go back to the latter one, as it is more pertinent to what has been bothering me lately. The Pygmalion effect has come into consciousness once again.